Waterbaby

By Nikki Wallschlaeger

In her astounding third collection, Nikki Wallschlaeger turns to water—the natural element of grief—to trace history’s interconnected movements through family, memory, and day-to-day survival. Waterbaby is a book about Blackness, language, and motherhood in America; about the ancestral joys and sharp pains that travel together through the nervous system’s crowded riverways; about the holy sanctuary of the bathtub for a spirit that’s pushed beyond exhaustion. Waterbaby sings the blues in every key, as Wallschlaeger uses her vibrant lexicon and varied rhythms to condense and expand emotion, hurry and slow meaning, communicating the profound simultaneity of righteous dissatisfaction with an unjust world, and radical love for what’s possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781619322370

Book preview

Nobody Special

Pick up my candles and dust them

I don’t know when the spirits get in

housework is done by nobody special

that’s the way it’s always been

Been working since I was a babe

I come home now and work for free

housework is done by nobody special

that’s the way it’s always been

I’m nobody special, nobody special

a washerwoman serving the cream

homemade confetti ready for them

playing with what they think of me

I’m nobody special, nobody special

seamstresses weaving our chains

no day off in a month of Novembers

busy making overalls for your gain

Dress up my candles and light them

I have a long long night ahead of me

housework is done by nobody special

that’s the way it’s always been

Been working before I was born

mother waiting on tables with me

housework is done by nobody special

that’s the way it’s always been

I’m nobody special, nobody special

waiting for some answers tonight

hoping somebody will hear me out

while the light keeps flickering, flickering

Middle Passage Messaging Service

for Wanda Coleman (1946–2013)

A word is an old story. One word, many stories,

one body, many bodies. To this day they move

across our line break lives & before we are

archived, lungs crackle with smoke until words

form in the long struggle smuggled on impact,

a thunderstorm bites & my world is a prayer

with a moon & all the birds from way back but

my throat is a blue cache of contraband winds,

when it’s brutal please help keep our language

thriving on big mama river is the word maroon.

Forbidden trees storages of lives pressed page

flowers herbs in their barbarian jailships on the

horizon bones shake with births & coughing,

keeping it down catching sick on the landform.

In life I live in the cold foliage of their unreason,

walking pneumonia drowned stories struggle,

silent memoirs, the cooking stoves are loaded

on the horizons cargo & people to this day

they run the sea months mouths housetraps.

Tearin the roof off this cold cruel mothafucka

outside the towers of excess is fluid smoking,

language tundra rumbling running ear nose

& throats tarsus tomes winking out of their

power plants, good & plenty different worlds

tearjerkers crybabies they got no memories

of their own cruelty waterlogged lifesickness.

To cry so hard is to laugh to laugh so hard

is to cry writing with the smoke is the word,

is an old story of our lives of the horizons in my

mouth, I bite the stories that drowned me in

their books with a moon & our real stories.

We live within the fugitivity of a thunderstorm,

lung-red caches formed from struggle from

walking from counting the siq seas mouthing

directions the language cargo of Black code.

We got all the words for how we got here,

where we are going & how we will get there.

All Kinds of Fires inside Our Heads

The number of bodies I have

is equal to the number of

gurney transfers that are

televised.

If we’re all just human

then who is responsible?

A fire station drying out

from addiction. Outside

the drizzling of firepower,

lowballing suns.

It’s like a sauna in here,

the strain of a charred

bladder. Bottled water,

bad